“We need to say honestly that these threats are something that will continue to occur in our country; they will not disappear in a year,” the president said at a session with Federal Security Service officials a day after a suspected suicide bomber killed 35 people and wounded more than 100 at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.

Taking the kind of hard-line stance that characterized his predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Medvedev said those responsible for the bombing should be killed without ceremony.

“Another challenge – and a very cruel one – has been cast at our society, at our government. As is customary in such situations, there is no need to stand on ceremony with those who we are going to be fighting against,” he said. “They should be destroyed on sight.”

The president went on to warn FSB officials that they need to carry out “maximally active work on preventative measures for terrorism and extremism.”

“Especially with young people,” said Medvedev, “who often fall into open criminal networks because of a lack of life experience or from winding up in a difficult situation.”

Careful work also needed to be done to prevent terrorist attacks at a series of upcoming high-profile events in Russia, said Medvedev: the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok in 2012 and the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014, among others

“There are elections ahead of us, this is also a very significant event in the life of our country,” he added.

According to former First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, now a leading opposition figure, the responsibility for the airport bombing does not lie mainly with the security services:

Many people are blaming the Russian security services for what happened, since they slipped up, left their work unfinished, and overlooked it. Others speak of the imperfections of the airport security system. All of this, without a doubt, is true. But the actual causes [of the bombing – ed.] are entirely different. Over the course of the past 11 years, the number of terrorist attacks in Russia has risen by leaps and bounds. From 2000 to 2009, the number of terrorist attacks has risen more than six times and reached an atmospheric number – more than 750 terrorist attacks in a year (in 2000 there were 130 – see ‘Putin. Results. 10 Years.’)

What we have here is the total collapse of anti-terrorism operations in the country. One hundred percent of the responsibility for this collapse lies with V. Putin. It was he who came to power in 2000 under the slogan of “flush the terrorists down the toilet.” It was he who used the war in the Caucasus and the apartment bombings in Moscow to the maximum extent to raise his personal political rating. It was he who actively used terrorist attacks to strengthen one-man government at the beginning of his career. After the terrorist attack in Dubrovka in 2002 he introduced total censorship over television and after the terrorist attack in Beslan he did away with gubernatorial elections, all the while strengthening his own, as later became clear, thoroughly corrupt vertical. At that time, we were instilled with the idea that we were obligated to sacrifice freedom and democracy for the sake of safety. We sacrificed. Now there are many more terrorist attacks and much less safety.

According to preliminary information, the explosion occurred at 4:32 pm local time after a man carrying a bag entered Domodedovo’s international arrivals area, where a large crowd was waiting at the baggage claim. The bomb that then exploded was at least as powerful as 5 kilograms of dynamite and was filled with metal screws and bolts to heighten its impact.

Eyewitness accounts and videos began streaming in from social media soon after the explosion. “A bomb exploded in Domodedovo. People are covered in blood, there’s smoke everywhere…” said Twitter user ann_mint, who says she works in the airport. “Everyone’s running somewhere. It’s awful.”

Another airport worker said that many foreigners were among the victims: “There were many Africans, people who didn’t speak Russian in general.”

Other witnesses said the baggage claim was filled with smoke and the smell of ash. A series of videos on YouTube and Twitter filmed during the immediate aftermath of the explosion showed thick smoke and piles of charred bodies, as well as medical personnel wheeling victims out of the airport. According to RIA Novosti, airport workers dismantled part of a wall to widen the exit for the victims.

Early reports of the number of victims varied. According to the Ministry for Emergency Situations, 168 people were injured, 74 of whom have been hospitalized. Moscow regional governor Boris Gromov told journalists that 34 people had died, two of them in the hospital.

Meanwhile, Domodedovo’s press service reports 35 dead and 46 injured. Sofia Malyavina of the Ministry of Health and Social Development reported 35 dead and 130 injured.

A statement on Domodedovo’s website confirmed that the explosion had occurred in the international arrivals area, “where people who aren’t passengers have free access.” It also said that the airport was operating normally, and that aircraft were still being allowed to land and take off as usual.

State authorities are calling the attack an act of terrorism. Operatives from the Federal Investigative Committee have been dispatched to the airport.

Authorities have reportedly found the head of a man who appears to have been the bomber. “The head of a man of Arab appearance has been found; he was approximately 30-35 years of age; he presumably set off the explosive device,” a source told Interfax.

The three men who have been identified as suspects were apparently already wanted by Russia’s federal security services before Monday’s attack. According to RIA Novosti, a recent operation had been carried out to detain the suspects in Moscow’s Zelenograd district, but was unsuccessful.

Investigators were careful to say that the bomber was not necessarily a “suicide bomber.”

“Until relevant expert analysis has been carried out, you need to be very careful when dealing with different types of terminology, including the word ‘suicide bomber,'” said one official, explaining that the bomb could have been detonated remotely, unbeknownst to the man carrying it.

In response to the attack, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev postponed a trip to Switzerland, where he planned to arrive on Tuesday to participate in the World Economic Forum. According to Gazeta.ru, the president ordered Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Governor Gromov to go to Domodedovo personally to ascertain the situation. “Everything needs to be done… to obtain quick information and conduct an investigation without delay,” Medvedev said at a press conference.

Chief of the Ministry of Health and Social Development Tatyana Golikova was sent to the airport by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in order to determine what kind of aid would be necessary for the victims. “A project for a government ordinance on providing material aid to the families of the victims needs to be prepared,” the prime minister said in a meeting with Golikova.

Moscow city officials said that the families of victims would be compensated with funds from the city budget.

“Aside from federal payouts, families of the victims will be compensated with 2 million rubles, critically-injured victims by 1.5 million rubles, those with moderate or mild injuries – 1 million rubles,” said Mayor Sobyanin. In addition, funerals for deceased victims would be free. “All of these services should be free,” said the mayor.

Speaking at a meeting dedicated to the work of law enforcement agencies in the North Caucasian Federal District, Prosecutor General Deputy Ivan Sydoruk said that the number of attacks in the region was up 100 percent in 2010.

The rise comes despite 30 counter-terrorism operations carried out in the North Caucasus in 2010, in which more than 300 militants, including 17 prominent leaders, were neutralized. In addition, police had confiscated 1,665 firearms, 91846 rounds of ammunition, more than 1200 kilograms of explosives and more than 110 explosive devices from weapons trafficking circles.

The admission by the prosecutor general’s office follows conflicting statements by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and leaders in Chechnya and Ingushetia over the success of counter-terrorism operations in the North Caucasus.

During a November 19 meeting on comprehensive measures to ensure stability in the volatile region, President Medvedev said that information presented to him indicating an improvement in the criminal situation was “nonsense.” “I have no faith in these statistics, they’re often nonsense,” said the president. He also said that the operative situation in the Caucasus “has practically not improved.”

In response, Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov issued a joint statement saying that President Medvedev was incorrect.

“The president said that it was ‘nonsense.’ But it’s clear to us that that’s not the case,” said Yevkurov. In an interview with Interfax, Kadyrov said he could not rule out the possibility that militants had been eradicated from Chechnya altogether.

In his turn, Russian Internal Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said last week that the number of terrorist threats in Russia remains high.

The region has seen 352 attacks by militant Islamist separatists in the first nine months of this year, four times the figure of a year ago, North Caucasus Deputy Attorney General Ivan Sydoruk was quoted as saying.

More than 200 security force personnel have been killed in attacks between January and September, while 400 militants have been killed, he said. The number of civilian victims was not provided.

Authorities have to date always insisted that they had the situation under control. Sydoruk however conceded that the government’s recent anti-terrorism operations were not having the desired effect.

In addition to the worst-affected republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, other regions, such as Kabardino-Balkaria, were also seeing increasing activity by militant separatists.

In the latest violence in the Caucasus, six people were killed and 10 injured in a suicide bombing in Dagestan Saturday, just days after six people were killed and 17 injured in an attack on the Chechen parliament.

Article copyright DPA

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty repots:

More than a dozen people have been killed in an explosion in the Russian republic of North Ossetia that officials say was the work of a suicide car bomber.

The midday explosion took place in a busy central market in the local capital of Vladikavkaz. Grisly video footage from the site showed dead bodies lying unattended in pools of blood and frantic doctors carrying injured victims in their arms.

Officials variously put the death toll at 14 or 15. It was unclear if the bomber was included in either figure. At least 80 others were reported injured in the blast, including a number of young children.

Officials in North Ossetia and Moscow say the explosion was the result of a suicide bomber who parked a car packed with explosives near the market entrance.

The Interfax news agency quotes the North Ossetian Interior Ministry as saying the Volga car involved in the bombing had a number plate from the neighboring republic of Ingushetia.

Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office, said a terrorism investigation had been launched into the attack.

A second explosive that failed to detonate was later detected at the entrance to the market.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the car-bomb attack. Speaking during a meeting with the chairman of Russia’s Union of Muftis, Putin said the bombing was “aimed at sowing enmity between our citizens,” and he expected Russian Muslims to make a “decisive contribution” to combating extremism.

The North Caucasus has been a growing source of concern for the Kremlin, as Islamic extremism and violent attacks continue to rise.

A suicide car-bomb attack on September 4 at a Russian Army base in Daghestan left at least five people dead, and came just days after an assassination attempt on a local Daghestan official.

Many local authorities say endemic poverty and the presence of hostile Russian security forces have contributed to the general unrest.

North Ossetia, which is predominantly Orthodox Christian, has generally seen less violence than other North Caucasus republics. But it is notorious as the site of the Beslan school siege tragedy, in which more than 330 children and adults were killed in September 2004.

North Ossetia also has its own history of bomb attacks. Alan Tskhurbayev, a former correspondent with RFE/RL’s Russian Service, spoke to RFE/RL from the scene of the blast.

“It’s necessary to say that this isn’t the first blast in the Vladikavkaz central market. It’s been the site of frequent explosions, starting in 1999, when 52 people were killed here,” Tskhurbayev said. “If memory serves, this is already the fourth blast here, or something close to it.”

Today’s market blast comes 11 years to the day after a bomb destroyed an apartment block in the Russian capital Moscow, killing 94 people.

The Kremlin blamed the blast on Chechen militants and used the incident and subsequent blasts as a pretext for initiating a second federal war in Chechnya.

In light of the revelations that last month’s suicide bombers were both natives of the North Caucasus Republic of Dagestan and young widows of deceased militants, Pamfilova spoke about what she saw as the reasons why such young Caucasians would turn to violence. Noting that she had just returned from a trip to the region, the rights activist said that young people in the Caucasus were confused and lacked direction as a result of unemployment, nonsensical social policy, and a lack of public control in the region. She also blamed Russian special forces for failing to consider the consequences of some of their tactical operations, which can often tear entire families apart and leave the survivors without a place to live.

“This is an intellectual war, and therefore there should be a stress in the region not of a nonsensical nature, but of an intellectual one. This is precisely the way that the intelligence agencies must win the war against terrorist ideologues,” Pamfilova said.

She also stressed that the main source of the region’s social ills was widespread, endemic corruption, which would not be possible, she said, without the support of the federal authorities. “We will never eliminate corruption in the North Caucasus if large amounts of money sent there are being ‘skimmed’ by officials in Moscow,” Pamfilova said at the press conference.

The Civil Society Institution and Human Rights Council was created in 2004 by then-President Vladimir Putin, with the ostensible goals of informing the president of the state of human rights and freedoms in the country and to create proposals to further the development of those same rights. It currently consists of thirty-six representatives from a variety of public organizations, including former Soviet dissident and prominent rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva. The last meeting in November focused on fighting corruption, specifically within Russia’s law enforcement agencies.

The War on Terrorism: Medvedev Takes Putin’s Path
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
April 8, 2010
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

In the week that has passed since the bombings on the city metro, President Dmitri Medvedev has actively intruded upon Putin’s personal domain – which the war on terrorism is considered to be – and proposed a few solutions. Clearly, they should demonstrate that his approach to this problem differs from the last one, which, considering what happened, has obviously not proven its worth. Today there are three initiatives – a presidential decree regarding transportation safety, the appointment of a new security force in the North Caucasus, and the introduction of a scale of terrorist threats.

The decree entitled “On the creation of a complex system to provide safety to the population on transportation” calls for the creation of a system to prevent emergency situations and terrorist attacks, most of all in the metro. Judging by the text, this would involve equipping public transportation with special technology to deal with “acts of unlawful interference,” and also systems to collect information about emerging emergency situations and threats of terrorist attacks. That is to say, additional systems to monitor passengers, and also all possible devices to determine the presence of poisonous, toxic, or other malicious agents in the air.

According to the document, the most vulnerable facilities should be equipped with this special technology by the end of next March, and the entire safety system should be completed by 2014.

Insofar as this is the only open document adopted after the bombings in the metro, one can make the conclusion that the state is intent on investing funds to prevent terrorist attacks at the last stage – when a terrorist with a bomb or poisonous gas cartridge is already moving toward a goal and falls into view of technical or other systems of control.

Meanwhile, it’s entirely obvious that cameras and censors don’t help to stop terrorists in the middle of a crowd in the metro or in a train station; at the very least, there have been no such examples of this happening in the past ten years. Moreover, as Russian experience has shown, barriers can be an obstacle to entering a defined area, but they won’t hinder a terrorist from detonating a suicide bomb in a crowd of people. At the Krylya festival in Tushino, a suicide bomber was unable to enter the stadium and blew herself up in the line at the barrier.

Of course, video cameras can help to quickly establish the identity of a suicide bomber, and, it’s true, that turns out to be helpful in the search for the terrorist’s accomplices; although, recently, as a general rule, they skillfully disguise themselves, covering up with caps and using glasses to change how their faces look. But none of this has anything to do with preventing a terrorist attack itself, and, at best, eases the investigation of a tragedy that has already happened.

In London, the world’s most developed video surveillance system (official figures say that Great Britain has one camera for every twelve people) couldn’t prevent the underground and bus terrorist attacks in 2005, although, as consequently became clear, the terrorists fell into view of the cameras numerous times on their way to the sites of the explosions and as they made preparations for the attacks.

British police already admit that all of this technology is practically useless even against normal crime, let alone terrorist attacks. The head of video surveillance management at Scotland Yard, Mick Neville, said at a 2008 press conference that less than one of every thirty crimes is uncovered with the help of CCTV – with its help, but not thanks to it exclusively.

Moreover, for understandable reasons, the metro and above-ground transportation in large cities cannot be equipped with the same safety measures that are used in airports (barriers, x-rays, all possible kinds of detectors). The head of the city metro, Dmitri Gayev, has spoken about this numerous times in the past few days.

The second initiative announced after the Moscow terrorist attacks was the scale of terrorist threats, which the National Anti-terroristt Committee is intent on introducing – not the same type that was introduced in the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It’s obvious that this scale is meant first and foremost for the population, since the intelligence agencies already have their own internal plan of action for any terrorist threats that show up. For example, before the 2005 terrorist attacks in London, the threat level was decreased. Moreover, experience has shown that raising the threat level only increases the nervousness of the population. Normal people who aren’t trained to identify dangerous behavioral indicators are inclined to see them in everyone that looks or behaves “just not right.” This, naturally, leads to a growth in suspiciousness and xenophobia. At the same time, the intelligence agencies wind up swamped with a humongous quantity of garbage information that they’re required to respond to.

Medvedev’s third step was a staffing decision in the North Caucasus. Having visited Dagestan, the president appointed Deputy Chief of Internal Forces Yevgeny Lazebin, who head the United Group of Federal Forces in 2005-06, as the supervisor of the Internal Ministry in the North Caucasus.

All three of these decisions proposed by Medvedev in the wake of the terrorist attacks have one quality in common: they are a direct continuation of the strategy formed by Putin in the beginning and middle of the last decade.

The Internal Ministry has been investing funds in a system to control the population, including with video surveillance, since at least 2005. The scale of terrorist threats has been the beloved brainchild of Nikolai Patrushev even since during his tenure as FSB director, and they’ve been trying to introduce it since 2004. However, while the effect of these two initiatives is simply doubtful, the appointment of an Interior Forces general belongs in a separate category.

The Kremlin began to systematically move the Interior Forces into the main role in the North Caucasus back in the middle of the last decade. Back then, the highest-rated terrorist threat was an attack on a city by large detachments of militants, as happened in 2004 when Basayev’s detachment took control of Nazran within nearly twenty-four hours. Therefore, the main task was considered as having heavily armed detachments of special forces on hand to deflect an attack and carry out tactical operations in the city or forest.

In appointing Lazebin, Medvedev has shown that he continues to consider attacks by powerful militants to be the most dangerous threat. It’s obvious that such an approach has nothing to do with preventing terrorist attacks by suicide bombers, which most of all demand intelligence work – not the Interior Forces’ strongest point.

Moreover, Medvedev’s choice demonstrates that the Kremlin isn’t planning to even begin a battle for “the hearts and minds” of the North Caucasus. The interior forces have a fully developed reputation in the region. There are no such words that could convince the local population to enter into cooperation with the crimson berets. But this scarcely worried Putin, and as is becoming clear, doesn’t interest Medvedev even a bit.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

Update 4/6/10: The Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, turned down the State Duma’s bill during it’s Tuesday session. Mihkail Kapura, deputy chairman of the judicial committee, cited a lack of viability to implement such restrictions and the danger of bringing about the destruction of free speech.

A new law passed on Monday by the Russian State Duma will ban the media from reproducing any statements whatsoever issued by anyone deemed to be a terrorist, ITAR-TASS reports.

The bill was written by Robert Shlegel, a member of the leading United Russia party and former press secretary for the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi. It will amend current legislation governing the media to include a ban on “the distribution of any material from persons wanted for or convicted of participating in terrorist activities.”

Shlegel said that the March 29 suicide bombings on the Moscow metro, which killed 40 people and injured more than 100, was the impetus for the bill. He said that he opposes giving a spotlight in the media to Doku Umarov, the Chechen rebel leader who has claimed responsibility for the attacks. He also criticized Google for allowing its YouTube video service to host a recording of Umarov’s post-March 29 statement.

“News about militants should consist only of reports about their destruction,” Shlegel concluded.

Amidst the heightened criticism at the Russian government’s failure to address terrorism originating in the country’s volatile North Caucasus region, some Kremlin supporters have accused the press of being terrorist collaborators. In particular, State Duma Speaker and United Russia member Boris Gryzlov singled out columnist Aleksandr Minkin of the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper as collaborating with the terrorists responsible for the March 29 attacks. Minkin has demanded an apology from Gryzlov and threatened to sue him for slander. Gryzlov has threatened a counter suit. Additionally, United Russia member Andrei Isayev has threatened that party members might sue Minkin for being a terrorist collaborator.

Director Oleg Panfilov of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations said that the new law will turn Russia into a country like North Korea and was another example of Shlegel’s “routine stupidity.” “It immediately raises the question,” he said, “Who do we label as terrorists? Those convicted by the court, or those that the bureaucrats consider to be terrorists?”

Secretary Mikhail Fedotov of the Russian Union of Journalists explained that nothing good could result from Russian society being deprived of information about the positions and confessions of alleged terrorists. “Society should know the face of its villains and understand what kind of evil it is being confronted with,” he stressed.

Even without the new law, the Russian media already faces complications with the authorities’ interpretation of current media legislation. Reports surfaced late Monday that the federal communications supervisory agency Roskomnadzor has accused the online edition of the Argumenty Nedeli newspaper of extremism for posting a video of Umarov’s statement. According to the agency, posting the video violates a law prohibiting the media from being used for extremist activity. The law, however, is criticized by oppositionists and human rights groups as being so vague as to allow the government to define extremism however they’d like, and has resulted in crackdowns on a wide variety of groups and individuals critical of the Kremlin.

In the days following Monday’s deadly suicide attacks on the Moscow metro, Russian television has come under mounting criticism for largely ignoring the incidents during the first critical hours after they occurred. As opposed to radio and print media, which are overall less subject to censorship, state-controlled television remains the primary source of news for most Russians.

While Russian television has been routinely criticized for refusing to air prominent oppositionists, anti-government protests, reports containing scenes of graphic violence, and other events that could cast the government in an unfavorable light, the public response to its failure to cover Moscow’s worst terrorist attacks in six years has been uncharacteristically harsh.

In a column for the online newspaper Gazeta.ru, Natalia Gevorkyan argues that today’s Russian television has gone beyond the breaking point and become an alternative reality that only its producers seem to believe in.

A Crooked Broadcast
By Natalia Gevorkyan
March 31, 2010
Gazeta.ru

Russian television has definitely ceased to be a form of news media. Its design of a virtual form of reality has reached the peak of perfection. TV has its own reality – with little jokes, idiotic talk shows that take one week to write, and programming that is in no way affected by reality. But in this country there is grief, the dead, the wounded, and shattered metro cars in the center of the capital. The result: on the day of the terrorist attacks, it was only the published news media that lay out the real reality, and not all at once. The remaining programs left the impression of a broadcast from Mars. They did not concern this life, or these deaths. (I’m not talking here about Russia Today. The television broadcasts for foreigners turned out to be more adequately realistic. This channel is in a different competitive milieu, the western one – normal, sensible, professional. They have to correspond.)

I was abroad when the events in Beslan began. Except for the breaks for headline news, which also began with Beslan, CNN showed only Beslan. RTR-Planeta at the time was telling me about prostitution. Now I’m in Moscow. The explosions occurred a kilometer away from my home. Or the explosions in Kizlyar, where another twelve of my fellow citizens were killed. Today. I turn on the television. Literally right now, Wednesday mid-day. Movie, movie, movie, drama, drama, drama, talk show about photography, talk show about court, something about Pasternak, songs, laughter. And only in the news breaks do you understand that people still haven’t been buried, people are still carrying flowers, still lighting candles, people are still crying, the prime minister is reanimating ten-year-old jargon, the Federation Council is apparently planning to institute the death penalty.

When cell phones stopped working on Monday, when cars with sirens sped off down Komsomolsky Prospekt and crowds of people moved towards them – if my arm had reached for the television switch, it would only have been as a last resort. The computer. The internet works. Everything is there. That’s all understood.

Then the radio. A more democratically accessible form of media. A separate thank you to radio hosts for their work on this black Monday. They did what television should have done. Right on time, the radio broadcast experts, opinions, and conversations, which are always better than silence and uncertainty. Even if they’re just empty responses to the primary questions: who, how, why? But the analysts, comparisons with analogous terrorist attacks, broadcasting information as it became available, interviews with news people – all of this is absolutely normal journalistic work. The radio flexibly reworked itself during the tragic events. It worked in person, live, broadcasting directly. A few radio stations even cut out their commercials.

The television managers couldn’t decide to do a live broadcast even in a situation that, in my view, obliged them to do so. They have betrayed their profession. They betrayed it long ago, when they allowed Putin’s TV watchdogs to erase live television from our lives, from the lives of citizens. They then began to design a country that was pleasant for the leadership to look at. This country, ideally, either cracks up at moronic jokes, or empathizes with the heroes of dramas, or is terrified at dissected corpses, or gets divorced together with a wealthy couple, or shares a child together with a famous singer, or is moved by its leaders, who crop up in the news clips so periodically that Brezhnev would have been jealous, or in a united fit of emotion even votes for them. This television, which the new president has not abolished either, looks like a meaningless, imitation Chinese vase, decorating the empty corner of a room.

Everything that radio did should have been done by television. Live broadcast, open studios where they could have questioned specialists, intelligence officers, doctors, witnesses of the events. Live. Effective editors, conversations, attempts to come together to understand, to overcome, to grieve, to calm, to unite. And the live programming, the latest information, the reaction of the government, the reaction of the world, the reactions of people in Moscow and Vladivostok, in Grozny and Irkutsk, and so on, that this television was already capable of doing ten years ago.

Guys, you already can’t do it, you’ve lost your instincts, you’ve killed them off within political labyrinths. Now you ponder what to let on the air and whether to let it on the air at all, but people are already dead, and your viewers already hear the emergency sirens; they already know what happened, they’re already pulling out the wounded and tying tourniquets. One day later, with you, the Caucasus don’t blow up; the screen shows some kind of different, glamorous life – while it’s already blown up into a multitude of dangerous splinters that get to us everywhere, including in the capital. Television has erased real life from its programming. It has wiped society off of its screen – living, reflective, disagreeable society that is unable to afford the new housing and utilities tariffs, is unemployed and hard-working, has not become spoiled, and has not ceased to think. It has wiped out everyone from its programming who was capable of asserting our right to monitor the authorities and control over the intelligence agencies. You didn’t notice when the country stopped trusting the state, the cops, the intelligence agencies, the prosecutors, the investigators, the courts. And you. You didn’t notice because you already have come to believe that the country consists of what television shows, prepares, dresses in Prada, writes on the prompter and sends out onto the air.

How many more tragedies have to happen, and what kind, so that those who answer for and create today’s television to trembled and shook, so that the viewer became more important than the government, so that they would decide to say in a stern voice: “We’re going live.” And so that instead of Karpov, as previously scheduled, Pozner‘s guest today was a girl saved at Lubyanka Station.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

The United Civil Front, a Russian pro-democracy social movement lead by Garry Kasparov, has issued a statement in response to Monday’s bombings on the Moscow metro. The attacks were the worst the city has seen in six years, leaving at least 39 dead and wounding more than 100. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin quickly promised “to destroy the terrorists,” and reports surfaced late Wednesday that Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov has taken responsibility for the attacks.

The government has come under criticism from an uncharacteristically wide range of sources for failing to live up to its promises to protect its citizens. Rights activists and oppositionists fear that the government will use the attacks as an excuse to impose further infringements on civil liberties, as has been the pattern over the past ten years.

Don’t Believe Putin
March 31, 2010

Compatriots!

The issue of citizen safety has once again become as sharp as ever before. However, the safety of Russia’s citizens has not depended on the citizens themselves for already the past ten years. The political regime established in Russia does not allow Russian citizens to influence the government through lawful means – with elections for local and federal authorities. As a result of the destruction of democratic freedoms, those very institutions of power have been destroyed, including the independent courts and the police.

The tragic events that occurred in Moscow on March 29, 2010, could be appropriated by the current government for an even larger infringement of the rights and freedoms of citizens of the Russian Federation. The apartment bombings in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk in the fall of 1999 triggered the beginning of a second military campaign in Chechnya and immediately provided Vladimir Putin with the necessary ratings for victory in the 2000 presidential elections. As a result of the terrorist attacks in the Dubrovka Theater in October 2002 and in Beslan in September 2004, elections for governors and regional leaders in Russia were abolished.

And today, after the events of March 29 in Moscow, it is obvious that these measures did not increase the safety of Russia’s citizens in the least. Regardless of the loud proclamations sounded over the course of the ten years of Vladimir Putin’s rule, neither he nor his team has succeeded in coping with terrorism on the territory of the Russian Federation. All of the pathos-laden talk about the necessity to reform the security agencies rings as hollow as ever before.

Instead of providing safety to the residents of Moscow and other Russian cities, the security forces have spent these years breaking up peaceful demonstrations of discontent where the government’s actions, including the failed federal policies in the Caucasus, are criticized.

Therefore, we call upon our compatriots not to succumb to the provocations organized by the Russian intelligence agencies, and not to forget the main cause of the troubles that have befallen our country. Any announcements by the government about the tightening of any kind of regulations on public order or attempts by Kremlin-controlled media outlets to distract citizens from the essence of the problem should be taken as the Putin regime’s routine bloody publicity spin. But all of this already happened at the beginning of the last decade. Now the time has come for society to fight against terrorism and the political extremism of the government.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.